Notes
[Notebook: DB 58 Bringing god home]
[Sunday 4 June 2006 - Saturday 10 June 2006]
[page 163]
Sunday 4 June 2006
Natural theology: Giving all the religions on earth a new, common, back end, a new set of physical layers.
INTEREST: an error correcting overhead paid out of the consequent profit.
My writing is my superannuation, and as age and injury threaten to curtail my building activities, I need to think about how to extract value from it.
Could it be that gravitation needs no quantum field theoretical explanation but is a feature of the network itself? This might solve the 'cosmic constant problem', a discrepancy in the vicinity of 10100.
[page 163]
Gravitation couples to mass.energy, that is to frequency/bandwidth. What if bandwidth attracts bandwidth, ie where there is more traffic it is cost effective to move closer together. [eg cities]
Weinberg I page 50: 'A symmetry transformation is a change in our point of view that does not change the results of possible experiments. ' Weinberg
Monday 5 June 2006
Tuesday 6 June 2006
The general theory of relativity revisited.
C P Snow Wisdom page 20: '. . . government's always been a bit of a confidence trick, you know. And when people begin to see through the confidence trick, then you tend to be rather in trouble. Snow
page 102: 'They each had what Lorimer as a boy had been taught to call a code. . . . '
Code, protocol: A method of putting ideas into packets, ie events, actions, practices.
Wednesday 7 June 2006
General relativity revisited: the purpose of this article is to understand the world by modelling it as a communication network with nodes called users and edges called connections. A connection is a set of packets. A node is a Turing (a-machine) machine or a network of oracle machines (0-machines).
ORACLE = REVELATION
Petroski: Success through Failure N 441:407. Petroski 'Things that succeed teach us little beyond the fact that they have been successful. Things that fail provide incontrovertible evidence that the limits of design have
[page 164]
been exceeded. Emulating success risks failure; studying failure increases our chances of success. The simple principle hat is seldom explicitly states it that the most successful designs are based on the best and most complete assumptions about failure.
forensic engineering,
Shannon: fundamental problem of communication : ' that of reproducing at one point either explicitly of approximately a message selected at another point.'
MacLean et al N 441:498 'Understanding the conditions that promote the maintenance of cooperation is a classic problem in evolutionary biology.' MacLean
Disaster generally is the explosive release of stored energy: earthquake, cyclone, nuclear weapon, fire (slow explosion) flood (slowish).
Thursday 8 June 2006
PLAY: requires spare energy; under natural conditions only available to the young.
Hilbert space is a linguistic framework for quantum mechanics: it gives the outlines of a way to talk about the way things are.
Begin with a collision free gas of points. If they are moving, collision free means that their 'cross section' for interaction is zero. In ordinary space they may be thought of s moving points of zero size. In communication space, they are nodes that do not communicate with one another.
[page 165]
GEOMETRY = PLUMBING: A function of the diameter and length of the pipes.
A cook is looking for complex functional relationships like the texture of a boiled egg as a function of boiling time and ambient temperature.
Quantum mechanics is a mathematical theory that relates observations of the Universe to one another. The deepest surprise, during the development of quantum mechanics, is the rather loose relationship between theoretical predictions and observations. Good old 'collapse of wave function'.
Understand this from communication theory.
'Virtual' particles are those whose packets do not come into the open enough to be observed, but whose presence is nevertheless felt, in formal communications.
Quantum mechanical algorithms use mathematical language to describe the behaviour of the mathematical entities destined to play the role of observables in models of the behaviour of the world.
. . .
Friday 9 June 2006
Zee page 3: 'energy can be converted into matter'. Zee
Better: energy s a feature of all process, and may be associated with a particle as a) internal process = mass, or b) external process (ie kinetic or potential energy.
. . .
[page 166]
. . .
Quantum mechanics: The probability of communication between two states is given by their normalized overlap.
Looking for explanation = looking for an alphabet in which to express the process.
How do we distinguish kinetic and potential energy : energy of motion; energy f position.
Motion = change of position. Energy is conserved.
Energy = actions per second, which makes sense for kinetic energy, but how do we interpret it for potential energy? This comes down to the difference of space and time. PARALLEL vs SERIAL.
Serial = kinetic
parallel = potential.
FORM has VALUE. The value of 1 + 1 = 2 is incalculable, or infinite, since it is realized every time that algorithm is used.
Once the world was a plaything of the gods (in the minds of the people). And then we began to see that is has a nature of its own, and modern science has taught us that nature is as clear and well defined as the best of mathematics. We can trust the Universe; what we have to do is communicate with it without error.
[page 167]
Energy = processing ate. In the survival situation, every dynamic structure needs a certain processing rate for its survival. Basically each cycle (on the average) must be equal to or greater than the one before it if the population is to survive.
What are electrons? x s?
Zee page 9: 'I especially enjoy [Feynman's] observation that if you put in a screen and drill an infinite number of holes in it, then that screen is not really there.
page 10: 'In quantum mechanics, the amplitude to propagate from a point qI to a point qF in time T is governed by the unitary operator e-iHT where H is the Hamiltonian. More precisely, denoting by |q> the state where the particle is at q, the amplitude in question is just <qF| e-iHT |qI> . . . . Of course philosophically you can argue that to say the amplitude is <qF| e-iHT |qI> amounts to a postulate and a definition of H. it is then up to the experimentalists to discover that H is hermitean, has the form of a classical Hamiltonian, etc.
Zee page 5: We replace the harmonic paradigm with the Turing network paradigm.
STATE1 -->STATE2 (by all possible paths)
Path integral formalism takes us from quantum mechanics to quantum field theory.
. . .
[Notebook: DB 59 Draughts]
[page 3]
Saturday 10 June 2006
The ancient heuristic pathway started from an introspective look at personal (mental) experience and extrapolated it to the world. The first result of this is to give rather human personalities to al the agents in the world and o attribute motives to them rather like our own. Many of the personalities grew to become gods, and some cultures, at least, fused a multiplicity of gods to one god, and used the feeling of their own minds, and some logic, to construct a perfect spiritual being that controls our entire world, down to the least detail. The definitive exposition of this model of god is to be found in the work of Aquinas, especially the first articles of his Summa Theologiae, a textbook of medieval theology. Aquinas
Lonergan brought the psychological foundations of this classical model of god to the fore in Insight. Lonergan He uses an introspective method to pinpoint the act insight, the event which moves use from not understanding to understanding a set of data. Archimedes.
Aquinas attributes the act or event of insight to the 'agent intellect' (intellectus agens) which he compares (?) to a spark of divine light.
Having introduces insight and given examples, Lonergan turns to 'inverse insight' which 'apprehends in some fashion that the point is that there is no point'. page 44.
[page 4]
Einstein remodeled Newton's space in a way that no longer specifically required God for its existence. He did this by using local observations to constrain the global structure of the space we inhabit.
Newton considered the Universe to be a creation made by god outside himself. This was the common view, and it was generally accepted by Newton's contemporaries that the Bible was a divinely inspired account of god's plan for his creation.
Einstein opened up the way for us to consider ourselves not outside but inside god. This view was already implicit in mechanics. Aquinas' proofs for the existence of god are all model dependent and arise from a model that makes 'potential' inferior to 'actual'. The development of Newton's point of view led to the conception of kinetic and potential energy as peers. In a classical harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum, energy is converted from potential to kinetic and back again, with, in theory, no loss, ie perfect conservation.
The historical abstraction and purification of the notion of god has moved it far way from common awareness. Let us now consider ourselves ad all agents as gods, that is centres of independent activity. Although independent, each agent is capable of communicating with other agents. From this point of view I attribute (mutatis mutandis) all my experiences as an independent
[page 5]
communicating agent to all other agents. By mutatis mutandis here, we mean allowances in the different complexities of agents ranging from electrons and photons to planets like earth and beyond.
Einstein began his cosmological modelling by studying communication between inertial systems in relative motions (two inertial systems at rest with respect to one another may be considered as the same inertial system).
He made two assumptions: the velocity of light (the maximum speed of communication) is the same for all observers at rest in their local inertial systems; [in other words, the velocity of light is a local property of the Universe}; and the laws of physics are the same for all local inertial (non-accelerated) observers. Observers here includes all agents, not just scientists.
To say that the laws are the same in different inertial frames is, from a practical point of view, to say that the written expressions of the laws are the same. So an agent floating weightlessly in a spaceship can send a message to a colleague in another inertial system and say that when I do the following with various agents in my system, they act as follows, and the colleague would reply 'same here'.
Now if we accept Landauer's hypothesis that all information is encoded physically, inertial systems cannot communicate, since as soon as one emits or receives a particle carrying a message, it feels a
[page 6]
force and ceases to be inertial. Action and reaction are equal and opposite.
This problem is remedied by the general theory of relativity which began with the happy thought that a person in free fall in a gravitational field would not feel his own weight.
This led to the principle of equivalence: the laws of physics (and therefore their theoretical expression) are the same in all freely falling systems, ie inertial frames. If this is the case, how do we detect the existence of gravitational field? The general theory gives the answer. Geodesic deviation, which can only be detected by communication between two inertial frames to measure their distance apart (eg by timing a reflected signal, like the corner reflectors on the moon.
Geodesic deviation is the way we measure the curvature induced by the presence of energy. Energy is what is measured by the stress energy tensor. We wish, among other things, to establish the mapping (local stress energy = matter) T = (local) bandwidth.
Bandwidth = mass attracts bandwidth by the (approximate) formula F - G bandwidth1 x bandwidth2 / (distance)2.
When the field gets intense enough, particles happen. It takes a certain motivation to speak
[page 7]
Misner, Thorne and Wheeler: 'Spacetime contains [is?] a moving river of four-momentum. Each particle [event] carries its 4-momentum vector with itself along its world line. . . . How can this flow be quantified? By means of a linear machine, the stress energy tensor T. page 130. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler
page 131: At each event in spacetime thee exists a stress-energy tensor.
The purpose of this article is to show the value of bringing the Universe alive again in terms of theoretical unity and ease of imagination and application. The task of science then becomes to understand the personality of each entity it studies, finding out how it responds to messages from its environment.
The complexity of gravitation we expect to be the lowest in the Universe, the oldest, simplest and most universal. Its simplicity is shown by the small number of dimensions (degrees of freedom), 4, that we have to deal with. We may consider the dimensions as four symbols in an alphabet, often written x, y, z, t or xi, 1 =<i =< 4.
Our Universe has a fixed nature that can be captured by algorithms and variable natures to which we can attribute only probabilities.
ENERGY = BANDWIDTH = h.f = number of operations per second
ENTROPY = BANDWIDTH X TIME = number of operations total (a
'download' file, etc)
We can think of our living Universe, like the life of god,
[page 8]
as a network of communications which we here model by a transfinite network constructed as follows: . . . transfinite network
A model is not much use to us until we can calculate with it. LANDAUER: MESSAGE = FORCE. Landauer
Motion is just as real as stasis (configuration)
Momentum = spatial resolution = spatial entropy
Energy = temporal resolution = temporal entropy
4-momentum = spacetime resolution = lifetime = spacetime entropy [bandwidth] = action (?)
spacetime entropy = spatial entropy + temporal entropy = entropy of alphabet x frequency of emission.
GRAVITATION: 4 numbers = 1 vector + conservation of [interval]
Gravitation describes meaningless, that is formal, communication in the same vein as a communication engineer who does not care what the users of the network are saying to one another, only that inputs can be mapped to outputs by deterministic algorithms.
Toward natural religion project : bring the Universe back to life. Catholicism killed the social Universe by making it all to answer to god alone.
All observations are cardinal numbers, So all the complex
[page 9]
vector stuff behind the scenes must ultimately be expressed in mappings to numbers.
calculate how often people masturbate = f(desire, inhibition)
In the living Universe we try to understand gravitation by analogy with the formation of cities: one can minimize the cost of increased rates of communication by moving closer together, either in physical space where the cost of communication is proportional to distance (eg walking) or whatever other space we are considering communication in.
Communication = transformation.
A concept" using a space = acting in. My tools constitute the dimensions of a space time which constrains, to some extent, what I do.
The general theory is thus an abstract (smoothed) version of reality.
Beale and Jackson page 3: 'The computer is a high speed serial machine, and is used as such, compared to the slow highly parallel nature of the Brain. Beale and Jackson
'Learning is thought to occur when modifications are made to the effective coupling between one cell and another. . . . '
Our metric in communication space is communication rate, just like the old maps that show by the width of a line how much tonnage follows various transport routes.
[page 10]
TRAFFIC ATTRACTS
page 10: MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine
Physics = traffic analysis
How often do we communicate with eachother?
